Years of Grace

by Margaret Ayer Barnes

  'I'll speak to her,' said Jane. She turned to mount the stairs.

  *And Mrs. Carver '

  'Yes,' said Jane, pausing again on the third step above the landing.

  'I'll have to speak to you again about my supper tray. The desserts — last night the cook sent me up only three prunes. I thought you'd like to know.'

  'Oh, I love to know!' thought Jane. But — *I'm sorry, Miss Parrot,' she said. 'I'll sec about it.'

  *Aiid Mrs. Car/er — Madam Carver spoke to mc again about using the back stairs. I'm not a servant, Mrs. Carver.'

  'You're a guest, Miss Parrot/ said Jane, *as I am mysel£ You'll have to use whatever stairs Madam Carver asks you to.'

  Miss Parrot's pretty hps were firmly compressed. Jane looked at her in silence. She was a very good heart nurse. Jane fell a prey to inner panic.

  Tlease be patient, Miss Parrot,' she said weakly. 'It won't be for long now.'

  *I shall use the front stairs,' said Miss Parrot firmly. And turned to descend them.

  Jane mounted to her room in silence. At thirty-six Hfe was terrible, she thought, as she pulled on her rubber shoes. It had no dignity. It wasn't at all what you expected, when you were young. Youth wasn't dignified, of course, but it was simple, it was joyous, it was expectant. In youth Ufe seemed — important. The things you thought about were important, no matter how inadequately you thought about them. But later you found yourself involved in a labyrinth of trifles. Worrying, ridiculous trifles. Things that didn't matter, yet had to be coped with. And you'd lost that sustaining sense that, at any moment, something different might be going to happen. At thirty-six you found yourself a buffer state between the older generation and the younger. You had to keep your son's trained nurse and you had to keep the peace with your mother-in-law. Did Miss Parrot think she liked to live with Mrs. Carver? Did Mrs. Carver think she Hked to live with Miss Parrot? If she could live with both of them, Jane thought, they might at least succeed in living with each other for two brief months

  'Jane!' It was the voice of her mother-in-law, raised in

  anxious protest from the terrace below her window. 'What are you doing, dear? The launch is waiting^

  Jane snatched up a hat and ran from her room. She dashed down the stairs. Oh, well! Stephen was coming that evening. They would go home in three weeks. Miss Parrot was a good heart nurse. She took all the responsibility. And Steve was much better. Gull Rocks had done a lot for him. The sun and the sea air. Her mother-in-law was pathetic. She couldn't really help Mr. Carver. And Stephen was coming.

  Jane banged the screened door and overtook Mrs. Carver on the path to the pier. She slipped her hand through her plump arm.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. T was talking to Miss Parrot.*

  •What about?' asked Mrs. Carver.

  'She was telling me she didn't Hke prunes,' said Jane, laughing.

  'Did she think that you cared?' inquired Mrs. Carver with acerbity.

  'Yes. But she was wrong!' Jane dropped her mother-in-law's arm and stooped to pluck a handful of sweet fern from among the beach grass. The grey-green petals, wrenched from the fibrous stem, exhaled a pungent perfume. Jane buried her nose in them. They were very sweet and warm from the sun. She ran lightly ahead of her mother-in-law out onto the pier.

  Mr. Carver was standing on the float, his watch in his hand. He looked severely at her from under his straw hat-brim.

  'Quickly, now,' said Mr. Carver.

  Jane sprang from the float to the boat. Aunt Marie was seated in a canvas deck chair. Her ankles looked thick and her small, wide feet very flat and stubby in her white sneakers. She had brought the August 'Atlantic' with her. Jane knew she wouldn't be allowed to read it. Uncle Stephen was sitting

  on the little varnished bench along the rail. He looked more like a baby than ever, thought Jane, in his round canvas boating hat. A semicircle of pink scalp showed under its floppy brim in the rear. Mr. Carver was carefully handing his wife up over the little landing-ladder. Her feet fumbled on the rubber treads and she clung a trifle nervously to his blue serge sleeve.

  *We may be in time yet,' said Mr. Carver quite happily. Then, with severity, 'The starting gun is late.' His tone implied that starting guns were not what they used to be. In the days when he was president of the Seaconsit Yacht Club

  Jane, perched on the rail, her rubber-shod feet upon the varnished bench, suddenly reahzed that she was laughing aloud. Carvers were pathetic. They were all over sixty. They didn't know how funny they were. Jane felt distinctly sorry for them. To a discerning daughter-in-law they didn't really matter.

  One white-clad sailor was pulhng up the ladder. Another was standing by to push off the launch. Mr. Can'er had taken his seat at the wheel. His shri-elled little New England face, with its grey Vandyke beard, was turned sideways and upward, estimating the weather.

  'Not much wind,' he said.

  The whir of the gasoline engine increased in volume, then quieted suddenly to a steady purr. The water wddened between the launch and the pier. Jane turned to vvatch the cat-boats, veering and tacking now, around the first buoy. Suddenly she heard the gun. Mr. Carver rose from his seat, still holding the wheel, to obser'e the start. Alden and Silly were well in the rear. That was too bad, thought Jane. She had long ago decided that, all things considered, it was preferable to listen to Alden talking all evening of how he had won a race than of how he had lost one.

  n

  *If the wind hadn't dropped at the second buoy/ said Alden, *we should have come in third.'

  'You made a mistake,' said Mr. Carver, 'splitting tacks on the second leg.'

  'We only missed that puff by four seconds,' said Silly.

  'But you missed it,' said Mr, Carver.

  'That was a matter of luck,' said Alden.

  'Exactly,' said Mr. Carver. 'I'm talking of the science of seamanship.'

  Jane, busy again with her knitting before the living-room fire, was not bothering to hsten. It was just the same sort of talk she had heard at Gull Rocks every Wednesday and Saturday evening of July and August for the last twelve years. Sometimes she listened. Sometimes she even joined in the argument. But to-night she was watching Stephen over her amber knitting-needles in silence.

  Stephen, settled in a chintz-covered armchair, with his daughter Cicily on a stool at his feet, was following the conversation of the assembled Carvers with interest. He was sailing the race over again with Alden and Silly. Jane knew he knew every rock in the harbour, every trick of the summer breeze that blew over the blue waters of the bay. In spite of the animation of his face, he seemed tired and very much in need of his holiday. Surrounded by the tanned yachtsmen he looked strangely white. The flesh under his eyes was just a little puffy and there was a new drawn Hne that Jane had never seen before around one corner of his mouth. Stephen had been very busy working over that bank merger. It had been a hot summer in the West.

  Stephen didn't have much fun, thought Jane. With a sudden pang she realized that he looked his forty-four years. His curly, blond hair had receded over his temples and was

  streaked with grey above the ears. The temples were rather shiny and the hair was growing perilously thin — considering Uncle Stephen and the forces of heredity — in a small circular area at the top of his head. His grey sack suit was just a little wrinkled after a hot afternoon in a New England train. Yes — Stephen looked just like what he was — the forty-four-year-old first vice-president of the Midland Loan and Trust Company, badly in need of his summer vacation.

  Men drew the short straw in the lottery of life, reflected Jane, as she looked at him. Men like Stephen, at least. Miss Thomas had claimed it was a man-made world. If so, men had certainly made it with a curious disregard of their own comfort and convenience. How terrible to have to be the first vice-president of a bank and work eight hours a day for forty years at a mahogany desk in the executive offices of the Midland Loan and Trust Company and never have more than a three weeks' hohday! Why did men do it? When the world was so wid
e and so full of a number of things and they didn't really have to marry to — to enjoy themselves.

  Wives didn't appreciate husbands. Ridiculous for her to carry on so about just having to five in idleness with the Carvers — who were, after all, quite harmless — at Gull Rocks — which was, after all, very pretty — for two brief months every summer, while Stephen

  Tt wasn't luck,' said Mr. Carver, 'that you had to concede the right of way to the Uncateena. If you hadn't been on the port tack, she would have had to give you room around the mark.*

  'We shouldn't have been on the port tack,' said Alden stubbornly, 'if the wind hadn't shifted.'

  *I think the winds are so uncertain this time of year,' put in Mrs. Carver pacifically.

  It was really pretty terrible to have to listen to them,

  thought Jane. Day in and day out. Perhaps it was worse than being the first vice-president of a bank. Men never had to listen to what bored them. Or did they? A sudden recollection of Stephen's patient face across the candlelight at her father's dinner-table rose in Jane's mind. Stephen, Ustening to her mother and Isabel. Robin, hstcning to her mother and Isabel. Her father, hstening to her mother and Isabel. The patient *Oh, all right, Lizzie!' that had terminated, since her earliest memory, so many of the Wards' domestic discussions.

  Perhaps people were all bored most of the time after they were thirty-six, thought Jane. Perhaps being bored was just a part of growing up and growing old. The excitement went out of things. Life no longer had a surprise up its sleeve. But still, after you were thirty-six, you went on living for another thirty-six years or so. Living and thinldng about annoying trifles.

  Why had Stephen, at twenty-two, wanted to be a banker? Why had Stephen, at twenty-nine, wanted, so desperately, to marry her? Why did he want, now, after fifteen years, to go on working at that mahogany desk, to protect the interests of the Midland Loan and Trust Company and support his wife and three children? Why did he want to waste the pathetic brevity of his three weeks' holiday at Gull Rocks every summer, when the world was full of beautiful, bewildering places that he would never see and life might be full of strange exotic experiences that he would never know? What kept men faithful, throughout a long lifetime, to the banks and the wives they had embraced in early manhood? The sense of duty? The force of habit? The hands of their children, perhaps.

  Jane looked at her fourteen-year-old daughter. Her young tanned face alight with enthusiasm, Cicily was saihng the race over, too, but rather with her father in a phantom catboat

  than with her aunt and uncle in the prosaic vessel now riding at its moorings beyond the pier. Cicily adored Stephen. And Stephen adored Cicily. In his eyes she could do no wrong. She could not even sit up too late. Jane knew she should have been in bed an hour ago. The other children had gone upstairs at eight.

  'Cicily,' she said, 'it's ten o'clock.*

  'But to-night's Saturday,' said Stephen quickly. It was a family joke. Whatever night it was was always his excuse for letting Cicily sit up ten minutes longer.

  'Yes, to-night's Saturday, Mumsy!' echoed the child. 'And it's Daddy's first evening.'

  Jane smiled indulgently. It was very difficult not to smile indulgently at Cicily and Stephen.

  'You heard your mother,' said Mr. Carver with severity.

  The child rose reluctantly fi"om her stool. She looked reproachfully at Jane, with Stephen's eyes and Stephen's smile. 'Why stir up Grandfather?' her glance said, plainer than words. She looked a trifle mutinous and very pretty, with her cheeks flushed in the firelight and her crisply curly fair hair a little loosened from the bow at her neck.

  'Good-night,' said Stephen, as she kissed his bald spot.

  'Good-night,' said Jane, as her lips met her daughter's smooth cheek. As she stooped for the caress, the child's fail hair streamed over her mother's shoulder.

  'Melisande!' laughed Stephen.

  'I want to put it up,' said Cicily. 'I'm fourteen and a half.'

  *Picnic to-morrow!' said Stephen, as his daughter turned toward the door. Her face lit up as she threw him a smile over her smocked shoulder. 'That child's growing up,' said Stephen, as she vanished into the hall.

  m

  Jane sat at her dressing-table, brushing the long straight strands of her brown hair, looking critically at her reflection in the glass as she did so. For more than a year, now, Jane had been endeavouring to think of herself as 'middle-aged.' On the momentous occasion of her thirty-fifth birthday she had said firmly to Stephen, 'Middle-age is from thirty-five to fifty.' But curiously enough, in spite of that stoical statement, Jane had continued, incorrigibly, to think of herself as 'young.' In this soft light, thought Jane dispassionately, in her new pink dressing-gown, she really did not look old. And she was prettier at thirty-six than she had been at twenty. No, not that, exactly. The freshness was gone. But prettier/or thirty-six than she had been/or twenty. At twenty every one was pretty, and most girls had been, after all, much prettier than she. But at thirty-six —Jane smiled engagingly at her reflection — she held her own with her contemporaries.

  At thirty-six the trick was not so much to look pretty as to look young. Beauty helped, of course, but not as much as youth. And she was still slim and agile and not grey and — but what difference did it make, anyway? It didn't make any difference at all, thought Jane solemnly, unless, like Flora, you were still unmarried, or, Hke Muriel, though married, you went on collecting infatuated young men.

  What use had Jane, in the Colonial cottage in the Chicago suburb, for youth or beauty or any other intriguing quality? Looking young didn't help you to preside over the third-grade mothers' meeting in the Lakewood Progressive School. Looking beautiful didn't help you to keep your cook through a suburban winter. There was Stephen, of course. But wasn't it Stephen's most endearing quaHty — or was it his most irritating? — that for ten years or more Stephen had never really thought about how she looked at all? To Stephen Jane looked like Jane. That was enough for him.

  The attitude was endearing, of course, when you looked a fright. When you were having a baby, or trying to get thin after nursing one, or hadn't been able to afford a new evening gown, or suddenly realized that you looked a freak in the one you had afforded. In crises of that nature it was always very comforting to reflect that Stephen would never notice. But in other crises — when the baby was a year old and you weighed a hundred and thirty pounds again and you had bought a snappy little hat that — or even when you were sitting in front of your dressing-table in a soft light and a new pink dressing-gown, waiting for Stephen to stop gossiping with his mother and come up to join you — it was irritating to reflect that, no matter what you did, to Stephen you would always look exactly as you always had. That you would look like Jane.

  Jane put down her hairbrush %vith a sigh of resignation and selected a new pink hair-ribbon from her dressing-table drawer. She tied it carefully in a bow above her pompadour and, picking up a hand glass, turned to admire the effect in the mirror. She wished her hair were curly. Suddenly the frivolity of that immemorial wish and the sight of the flat satin hair-ribbon and the long strands of straight hair made Jane think of Andre. Of Andre and of being fourteen. Of Flora's red-gold tresses and Muriel's seven dark finger curls. Of Andre's resolute young face and the shy, unspoken admiration in his eloquent young eyes. Funny that just the sight of a hair-ribbon should make her feel his presence so vividly. Should so recall that funny little warm, happy feeling, deep down inside, that was so integral a part of being fourteen and loving Andre and never feeling quite sure of how he felt about her in return.

  Andre. Andr6 was a bridegroom now. Four months a bridegroom. Jane wished she had written to him, as she al-

  most had, that day last spring when she had found his picture in the May copy of *Town and Country' in Muriel's living-room. But it had seemed absurd to break a silence of fifteen years' duration just because she had seen a snapshot, fi"om the camera of the Associated Press, of Andre, with averted head and raised silk hat, resplendent
in bridal finery, hastening through the classic portico of the Madeleine with a vision in floating tulle on his arm. A vision reported to be, in the legend beneath the snapshot. Mademoiselle Cypriennc Pyramel-Gramont, daughter of the Comte et Comtesse Jean Pyramel-Gramont. 'Noted Sculptor Weds' had been the caption.

  Andre was a noted sculptor. One of France's most distinguished sons. Eight years ago, on the occasion of her memorable trip abroad with Stephen, Jane had come suddenly on his 'Adam' in the corridors of the Tate Gallery. Stephen had called her attention to it. He had noticed it because it was double-starred in Baedeker. 'This can't hcjyour Duroy/ he had said.

  Later his 'Eve' had met Jane's eye with an enigmatic smile over her yet untasted apple, in the entrance of the Luxembourg. An Eve still innocent, but subtly provocative. Jane had regarded her with wistful interest. What had Andre said in the postscript of his long explanatory letter —Jane had never forgotten — 'There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas?' And what was Stephen saying at the moment? 'Golly, she smiles like you, Jane! He never got over you!'

  'Well, why should he?' she had retorted lightly. But her mind was still busy with the postscript. 'Something you brought into my Hfe. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.'

  She had brought romance into Andre's life, as they walked

  ap the Lake Shore Drive together, with their schoolbooks under their arms. He was achieving its fulfilment, now with this French Cyprienne, in exotic settings that Jane could not even imagine. Andre was thirty-eight. Yet Andr6 was a bridegroom, while she, Jane, was a settled suburban housewife and the middle-aged mother of a fourteen-yearnDld daughter and an eleven-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son. Jane felt devoutly grateful that the Atlantic rolled between them. That Andre would never see her again. That he would think of her, always, as she looked in a hair-ribbon, while' Cyprienne had babies and grew old and came to look only like Cyprienne. But Cyprienne wouldn't grow so very old, thought Jane almost resentfully, while Andre Uved to sec her. Cyprienne, under the floating tulle, hadn't looked a day over eighteen. Four years older than Cicily, perhaps, and bc-witchingly pretty. Sixteen-year-old Andr6, a middle-aged Frenchman with a child bride!